47. Train entering the St. Gotthard Tunnel, Switzerland - 18 Sept 1900 | Glass Plates
Glass plate 47 captures the moment when a steam train, white plume bursting from its chimney, disappears into the St. Gotthard Tunnel.
This is a well-timed snap shot that demonstrates the speed at which the gelatine dry plate process could take photographs.
This dry plate method replaced the earlier collodion “wet plate” method, which required the photographer to coat the glass plate with collodion himself, expose the photo, and develop the image before the plate had dried. With the dry plate method, however, the silver bromide emulsion was already on the glass plate when purchased and merely had to be stored away until exposed, then rehoused to be developed later.
Introduced in the 1870s, the dry plate method made photography much more accessible as it required significantly less chemical expertise and meant that tourists, such as the unknown photographer, could travel with their camera and plates without having to worry about coating and developing each in the short period before and after it was taken.
The Longest Tunnel in the World
St. Gotthards Pass has been used as a route through the Alps for centuries. Since at least the 13th century it was the chosen path for muleteers following the construction of the first wooden bridge across the Schöllenen Gorge around 1220.
With the coming of rail travel in the 19th century, the idea of a route through the Alps, connecting the North Sea to the Mediterranean, had been envisioned as a way of further connecting world trade and tourism through ambitious scientific advancements.
The Gotthard Railway Company was established in 1871 to oversee this project, and Swiss engineer Louis Favre was hired as supervisor of works and prime contractor; but with great advancement comes a multitude of challenges to overcome. Miners digging from either side to meet in the middle, the project took a decade to complete. On some days, due to the hardness of the bedrock, they only managed to move closer by a metre, and the cost of the tunnel kept increasing.
Work conditions were brutal, with miners being killed in dynamite explosions, crushed in rockslides, and drowned in water inrushes. In total, approximately 200 workers died, included four shot by police during a strike against the work conditions in 1875. This number does not include those injured or those suffering the long-term effects of diseases such as hookworm that the miners contracted while working.
Source: "Unser Gotthard", Lüönd/Iten
Louis Favre himself was a casualty, collapsing from a heart attack in the tunnel on 19th July 1879 – a mere six months before the two tunnels met in the middle with impressive accuracy. With this achievement, the 15km long St. Gotthard Tunnel, passing through the Saint-Gotthard Massif mountain range from Göschenen in the north of the canton of Uri to Airolo in Ticino, became the longest tunnel in the world.
Opening for traffic on New Year’s Day 1882, the tunnel was met with enthusiastic attention from around the globe. A year later, in 1883, quarter of a million passengers and over three hundred thousand tons of freight passed through.
The Gotthard Tunnel was a stunning engineering achievement, although the cost of workers lives must not be forgotten, and they are commemorated by a memorial at the Airolo station.
A Few More Stops to Go
The train may be leaving, but we won’t be catching it. The remainder of glass plates – there are only three to go on this journey – stay in and around Göschenen and Andermatt.
Thank you for reaching this far with me, I hope you will join me next time.
References
Brunn, Stanley D., Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects (New York: Springer, 2011)
‘The Legend of the Gotthard Pass’ (2019), The House of Switzerland <https://houseofswitzerland.org/swissstories/history/legend-gotthard-pass>
1900 Glass Plates: This project explores a series of glass plates from the year 1900 with the eventual goal of travelling the same route as the photographer. It will be a varied journey that will stretch from simple blog posts examining each photo to videos and more. This project is in collaboration with photographer Aleksandar Nenad Zecevic, who’ll be restoring the photographs to bring out details dimmed by time. More to follow.
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